Winning Post

This week in Winning Post

If you’ve got a two-year-old and you want to earn some black type before the season’s finished, you’d better get your skates on.
In fact (unless you want to take on the older horses in the Bletchingly), you’ve got two chances left — this Saturday’s Oaklands Plate at Morphettville and Saturday week’s SA Lightning, against the three-year-olds at weight-for-age.

One promising filly whose connections are looking to add a zero or two to her value in the Oaklands Plate is the Danny O'Brien-trained Pouting Lips, an impressive recent debut winner at Echuca.

The Oaklands Plate is one of three listed events around the country this Saturday, with the Queensland Tatts club running an open mile at Eagle Farm and the Belmont Classic in Perth.

Our form coverage kicks off on Friday with full form guides for Racing.com Park and Taree as well as fields, colours and selections for Dubbo and Ipswich.

The metro racing this Saturday is at Flemington in Melbourne, Randwick in Sydney, Morphettville in Adelaide, Eagle Farm in Brisbane and Belmont in Perth.

Winning Post carries full-colour liftout guides for all those meetings plus Moe (Vic/SA/Tas edition), Kembla Grange (NSW edition) and Gold Coast (Queensland edition), as well as fields, tips, ratings and/or colours for other TAB Saturday cards.

On Sunday we've got liftout formguides for four more TAB meetings plus fields, ratings, tips and colours for a stack more Sunday and Monday programs.

Don't forget Winning Post now carries trackwork reports for all four Melbourne training tracks, all three in Sydney, Morphettville in Adelaide and a general Brisbane report.

Away from the form, we've got news columns from Queensland, NSW, six Victorian districts, SA and Tasmania.

... More

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Tasmania: Drought-breaker leads Blacker quartet .................................................................................................................................................

Wimmera: Simon on a roll with Rock .................................................................................................................................................

Central Victoria: Rising nine, Donchess delivers .................................................................................................................................................

NSW country: Action needed on contamination .................................................................................................................................................

More Stories

Inside Winning Post July 20 edition you'll find liftout form guides for:

Friday:

Racing.com Park, Taree

Saturday:

Flemington, Randwick, Morphettville, Eagle Farm, Belmont, Moe (Vic/SA/Tas edition), kembla Grange (NSW edition), Gold Coast (Qld edition)

Sunday:

Racing.com Park, Narrandera, Wangaratta, Devonport

Eye Catchers

Each week Paul Richards identifies horses from recent race meetings that he believes are ready to win. Here we update you when they are about to have their next start.

Racing.com Park Synthetic Friday - R8 N8 Triage

Morphettville Parks Saturday - R3 N2 Counter Drive

Royal Randwick Saturday - R3 N8 Misteed

Royal Randwick Saturday - R9 N12 Natalia

Flemington Saturday - R1 N7 One More Try

Flemington Saturday - R5 N8 El Questro

Flemington Saturday - R7 N5 News Girl

Results

Letter of the Week

Cups and downs

The Ballarat Cup, a listed race, is now worth $500,000 while the Group 3 Geelong and Bendigo cups are worth $400,000.
All three have increased substantially in value in recent years, but needless to say the narks and naysayers have been out in force anyway.
The fact is that the Geelong and Bendigo races draw substantial benefit from their positioning on the calendar.
Don’t forget, it wasn’t all that long ago that the Bendigo Cup was run after the Flemington carnival. Had the calendar change not occurred, it would never have achieved Group 3 status.
The Geelong Cup’s position enabled it to produce the 2002, 2010 and 2011 Melbourne Cup winners.
If the Ballarat Cup was to stay in its current slot in mid to late November, it needed another boost in order to attract a decent-sized field of quality stayers. Maybe the $500,000 purse will have that effect.
A different solution could be to swap the Ballarat Cup, now over 2000 metres, with the Gold Nugget (1600m), currently run at Ballarat’s September Sunday meeting.
A 2000-metre country feature three weeks before the Cranbourne Cup makes perfect sense, even if the previous day’s Naturalism has to move.
If the Gold Nugget was a $1 million race in November and WA could be persuaded to move its carnival back a couple of weeks, it would make an ideal lead-up to the Railway.
That would allow the WA carnival to flow straight through to Perth Cup day, getting rid of the hiatus it has now. Of course, that would require interstate co-operation, which clearly is too much to ask.

Mitch Matheson
Castlemaine (Vic)